Blogging about all sorts of things--governance in higher education, in businesses, and in law firms; bankruptcy ethics; popular culture & the law; Enron & other corporate fiascos; professional responsibility generally; movies; ballroom dancing; and anything else that gets my attention.

Saturday, May 30, 2015

Not that very long ago, UNLV was lucky enough to persuade Professor Paul Oh to join our faculty. He and his team are about to compete in the DARPA Robotics Challenge, and I'm rooting for Hubo (now the "Metal Rebel") to win.

UNLV’s “Metal Rebel” – a 5 ft. 5 in., 175-pound humanoid robot - will test its mettle against the likes of MIT, NASA and Lockheed Martin in simulated disaster courses where it may have to:

·Drive a vehicle

·Climb stairs

·Traverse rocky and/or debris-filled terrain

·Turn valves and use power tools

Our student/faculty team is led by Dr. Paul Oh, Lincy Professor for Unmanned Aerial Systems and a renowned expert in robotics and autonomous systems. Oh is a former program director for robotics at the National Science Foundation and is helping UNLV and Nevada become a national leader in the booming autonomous systems industry.

We'd love to see you in Pomona cheering for our team in the grandstands and representing UNLV in scarlet and gray, but if you can't make it out to Pomona, we'd still appreciate your support.

Teams will compete both Friday (6/5) and Saturday (6/6), and the competition will stream live at roboticschallenge.org The competition schedule will be finalized just before the competition, and we’ll follow with detailsnext Thursdayafternoon on when to you can see Team UNLV in action.

Monday, May 04, 2015

Everything I've read about Dave Goldberg, including this New York Times obituary, indicates that he was an extraordinary person, and my heart goes out to his family. Equal relationships should be the norm, but I hear that they're not. The marriages and partnerships of my friends sure seem equal, and maybe that's an artifact of the fact that many of us "partnered up" later in life, after we knew who we were and what we wanted in a mate. But Victor and Jeff, Whitney and Beth, Cathy and Laura, Nettie and Luc, Ted and Amy, and many of my other friends evince a love and a respect that leaves both people in the couple feeling supported and nurtured.

And I sure lucked out with my Jeff: he's spurred me on, moved (three times!) for me (and taken two extra bar exams in the process), given me useful criticism and, as much as anyone can with me, tried to keep my ego within normal limits--all with good humor and wise advice. I can't imagine my life without him, which is why I feel for Sheryl Sandberg and their children.

Friday, May 01, 2015

There's a great article by Paula Krebs in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education's Vitae section (here). In it, she talks about the importance of working on difficult issues by first imagining why the person sitting across the table from you has formed her views. The idea of assuming that the other party to a negotiation has principled reasons for her position is a good way to see any difficult issue as an issue to be solved collaboratively.

Here's my favorite quote from her essay:

Since transitioning out of the faculty and into administration, I've had to work hard to learn how to shut up and listen. My job, I've discovered, isn't to solve the problems. It's to understand them and then work with the people affected to come up with ways to solve the problems.

Every time I have tried to solve a problem when it's presented to me, I've created more problems. So I'm learning to talk to more people, to ask more questions, to listen to the answers.

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